I was a bit oblique last time I wrote about icon design; I said I’ve been thinking about the subject lately, but I didn’t say why.

After watching the happenings over at IconBuffet, StockIcons, and the new IconShoppe, it struck me last year that stock icon design might be something interesting to try out myself. I’ve worked on icon design projects in the past, so I knew I could do it, it was just a matter of finding the time.

Chalkwork is ultimately a much larger set of icons unified by common style and colour; Basic is simply the first pack of what I hope to be many more. There are around 250 in the family so far, but at one point I finally decided to focus on a smaller subset and just get them out there to make sure there’s a demand before I produce the rest.

I’d like to see the family grow to a thousand plus in total, but that all depends on what happens next. So if you or your favourite site/application developers are looking for a consistenly designed, high quality set of icons, make sure to spread the word!

Awesome job, Dave. And kudos for the 3D chalk tabs on the product page — it really sets it off (God, now I sound like one of my marketers). I’m curious about that image… Photoshop? Maya? Oil paint and a fine brush?

Great work Dave! This is definitely not an accusation, but I’m curious about the RSS icon that you’ve included in your set. Because it’s sort of a standard, are there (or, were there) any issues involved with ‘selling’ that icon as a piece of another product?

Nice work. There is one critique (not necessarily of your work). Is it possible to organize icons by groups or tags.

As I add more icons I find it becomes increasingly difficult to organize and find and even though everybody may have different organizational ideas, if you did some sort of folder grouping (in download) it would be easier to determine what to do with them.

I came up with the idea to use scotch mints as the product images. I photographed a set of mints sitting on top of a glass surface, then Photoshopped the icons over top.

@Joe Marini - “Any chance you’ll make them available also as WPF vector graphics in XAML?”

Vector might be an option one day, but that would probably require a separate release. There’d be quite a bit of work to do cleaning up the outlines for a decent vector set.

@Jonathan E - “I’m curious about the RSS icon that you’ve included in your set”

Hadn’t really thought about it, I saw other icon sets with their own stylized version of it and followed their lead. Note that my version actually is one I custom-created for this set (though it admittedly ended up being similar to the one at feedicons.com)

@Kevin Marino - “Is it possible to organize icons by groups or tags.”

Not entirely sure how that would work at the file system level. The sample set gives you an idea of how the final set is organized by folders, with a preview image at the root. This is the best I came up with on my own, but if you’ve got an idea for implementing tags without having to spend a bunch on custom development, I’m all ears.

@rigbey - “These icons look too generic for my taste.”

Fair criticism, but my guess is that’s the nature of stock. I’m guessing wildly unique and stylized icons don’t sell nearly as well as more generic sets.

I absolutely love the icon mints. However, it’s hard to get a good feel for the actual icons with those copy protection dots all over. It gives your icons a washed-out, sort of matte finish. Would you consider just using a band of dots in the middle, so we could at least get a little glimpse of pure icons?

@Kevin Marino: If you’re on a Mac, you could import the icons into Pixadex: http://iconfactory.com/software/pixadex/ It allows you to organise your sets by folder/sub-folder/collection/smart-collection and search by name/app/tags and probably a few other ways I haven’t figured out yet—very handy. I hear there is a new version in the works, as well (that will accommodate much larger sizes). Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with the product (just a fan). Unfortunately, I’m not sure if something like this exists for the PC … ?

Congratulations on your first step into the stock icon arena, Dave. I bet Dan Cederholm is frantically working on his next set to out-iconize his new competitor (ehm, companion?).

But (there’s always a but around somewhere), I feel there’s a slight off-balance in the set as a whole. The control icons (arrows, play-pause-next, delete, confirm etc) seem a bit ‘fat’ compared to the more descriptive icons (document, report, chart, contact, hard drive, photos). And I can’t suppress a slight Windows taste sensation. What are your feelings about this?

But overall: cool job, I’m looking forward to the more comprehensive set!

Not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing, but I find the red overlay quite a bit intrusive. A few red lines would probably do the trick. I am also an icon artist and looking at your icons I can hardly picture what the true colors should be. Most people in this industry either use plain red lines or sometimes even nothing at all. I completely understand why they are there, but I would love to be able to really see the true colors.

Like Geof’s post:
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Geof Harries says:March 26, 13h
What I really want to know is the technique you use to create the image above in Photoshop (I presume?).

I’ve seen this “foggy” window effect before, where it appears like you’re looking at the monitor on an angle. I’ve tried to replicate this myself, but to no success
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I to would really like to now how you achieved the “looking at the monitor” effect with your Chalkword basic picture above!

The slight angling and blurring I have found difficult to replicate… I’ve seen this effect done many times on different sites but would love to know how to do it… Fancy posing us a tutorial?!? Please… :|

…for the image perspective and tilting stuff, I simply use the ‘3-D Rotation’ tools in MS Powerpoint…(Paste the screen-shot into a blank slide, then play around with the 3D properties of the image, then save the resulting image back out)

I guess there are great filters for Photoshop to achieve the same effect, but as I don’t use this, this is my simple approach.